Teun Voeten Books

Het Mexicaanse Drugsgeweld

By Teun Voeten | 2018

This is the Dutch journalistic version of the PhD thesis from Dr. Voeten. Teun Voeten has been focussing on the Mexican Drug Violence since 2009, as a photographer, journalist and anthropologist. It is currently the most violent conflict in a modern, industrialized country, taking nearly 180.000 casualties in 10 years time. Voeten analyses how a Voeten neoliberal system in overdrive creates a class of superfluous, expendable people who become the foot soldiers for the cartels, that function as predatory, hyper-capitalist corporations. The drug violence is a form of hybrid warfare, just as the war between radical islam and the West. Voeten talks to Mexican assassins for hire (sicarios) and compares them with Jihadists, West-African child soldiers and crack dealers from New York. He explores the sense of senseless violences and researches how humans become ruthless killers that are able to commit ‘inhumane’ acts that are in fact very human.

In 1994, Voeten started a photo reportage on the underground homeless in New York. This short project became a long story and finally evolved in a book. In 1996, ‘Tunnelmensen’ was published in Amsterdam. It appeared in an updated and translated version in 2010 in the USA.

Voeten made two photo books: ‘A Ticket To’ (1999) a dark, somber book with black and white photos from the conflicts in Afghanistan, Bosnia, Rwanda and Sierra Leone. ‘Narco Estado, Drug Violence in Mexico’ is a book where color photos depict the horrible violence.

After being nearly killed by doped up child soldiers in the civil war in Sierra Leone, Voeten wrote ‘How de Body? Hope and Horror in Sierra Leone’ which appeared in the Netherlands (2000) and the USA (2002). A Chines translation is in the making.

His PhD research resulted in the academic publication ‘The Mexican Drug Violence
Hybrid Warfare, Predatory Capitalism and the Logic of Cruelty’. and a Dutch journalistic book which will appear in September 2018.